All the World Loves a Lobster

There is a section of Route 1 in midcoast Maine – in Wiscasset, about halfway between Portland and Camden – where the traffic comes to an absolute standstill because of a tiny shack selling lobster rolls. Technically, there are two lobster restaurants, located across the street from each other – Red’s Eats and Sprague’s – but the line that snakes around the corner and down the street at Red’s Eats is the one that tends to snarl up traffic. Amazingly – especially considering my love of food served from tiny shacks on the side of the road – I have never stopped at either establishment in all my years of making the drive. Part of the reason is the desire to avoid being swept up in even more traffic, but it could just as easily be that there are so many other choices along the way. In fact, in preparation for my trip this year, I pulled up a map of every lobster roll venue along my drive.

I’m fairly certain there are more options along that route. After all, although American lobsters (Homarus americanus) can be found throughout the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, all the way south to North Carolina, they are perhaps most closely associated with the state of Maine. According to the state government’s website, “Maine is the largest lobster producing state in the nation.”

Since I was planning to be in lobster central on National Lobster Day (September 25) and thus already had lobsters on the brain, I decided to trawl through the archive and see if I could dredge up any lobster-related collections. One of the first collections I pulled up was the digital presentation of the Center’s Rhode Island Folklife Project. Between July and December 1979, a team of fieldworkers traveled throughout the state, documenting the “ethnic, regional and occupational traditions of Rhode Island,” as well as examples of the state’s “maritime activities, material culture, and local history.” This, of course, includes lobstering.

[As a side note: so far as I can see, lobster rolls were not a common food choice for the fieldworkers during their stay. However, fish and chips appear to have been quite popular, with Henry Horenstein and Gerri Johnson even visiting several locations on a single day. It made me wonder whether the lobster roll’s absence in the fieldnotes speaks more to the eating habits of Rhode Islanders or visiting fieldworkers. It also makes me wonder where Rhode Islanders come down on the whole Maine vs. Connecticut lobster roll rivalry.]

In his August 9, 1979 fieldnotes, folklorist Michael E. Bell wrote:

“A young lobsterman (25-30 years old) ties up as we are about to leave Long Wharf. I talk with him and take photos; he is reluctant at first to have his picture taken or to give me his name, but finally he relents and carries on with his work. His name is Brian Libby, and he has been an independent lobsterman since age 15. He tells me that this is a tough season, due to presence of sea worms which clog pots. I ask about theft of lobsters from pots, and he characterizes that as a problem, especially from the pleasure boaters.”

Almost a month later, Michael Bell found himself back on Long Wharf once again:

“Today I devote the entire morning and afternoon to walking along the harbor in Newport. I am intending to begin documenting occupations in Newport, I start at Long Wharf and walk south past Bowen’s Wharf, all the way down along Thames Street. I must walk about four miles today, and I meet several people involved in various businesses and occupations along the harbor front. At the Aquidneck Lobster Company I talk to Skelly Connelly. Mr. Connelly agrees to allow us to come and photograph and tape record if we wish next Tuesday, Sept. 11^th. He recommends that we arrive somewhere between 6 and 7 a.m. since that is when most of the action occurs.”

We know that at least one person from the field survey team did, in fact, make it to the Aquidneck Lobster Company on the morning of September 11, 1979, as the collection includes photographs (included throughout this post) taken by Henry Horenstein. Unfortunately, there is no documentation of the visit in Bell’s fieldnotes. The next entry in his notes is dated “November 20,” with no mention of the lobster company or who might have accompanied Horenstein that day.

Thankfully, AFC does have other collections which feature the oral histories of lobstermen from Maine and Rhode Island. The Markham Star collection (AFC 2013/031), for instance, includes transcriptions of interviews with fishermen who were working in Rhode Island in 2009. According to Starr, he gathered the interviews, along with thousands of photographs, in an effort to preserve “something of the industry before it disappeared altogether.” I have chosen to include quotes from some of these interviews alongside Horenstein’s photographs from the 1979 field survey. After all, as Starr says in his book Finest Kind: The Lobstermen of Corea Maine (p. 27):

“There are, of course, no better people to talk about lobstering than the fishermen themselves. Not only are they experts in their field, but they are also passionate about the work they do and proud of the heritage to which they belong.”

Alan Wheeler Interview, commercial fisherman. Born June 13, 1947

“Luke [my son] would go with me for money, and I liked keeping money in the house, and I would almost save stuff up for him for when he was going to be out of school…so he’d be there. It was fun – it was a lot of fun. I had somebody running the Shirley Ann, and he and I would go lobsterin’ out of the skiff. We’d fish three or four hundred traps out of a skiff. And it was easy money, so to speak – it was right there. Catch hundred, two hundred pounds of lobsters a day, and at the end of the week you had a nice little chunk of money.”

In a January 22, 2009 interview in Narragansett, Rhode Island, lobsterman Tom Hoxie (born 1956) shared that following the end of WWII, where his father had served as an MP and guarded Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Tom’s father “couldn’t make money doin’ anything, ‘cause it was like damn near a depression, so he ended up going quahoggin’ and did some lobsterin’, but you couldn’t make money lobsterin’ – you couldn’t sell it. In the summertime you could sell lobsters if you were really lucky for a while, and then as soon as it slowed down no one would buy ‘e. He didn’t like fishing, fishing, fishing, so he went quahoggin’. He did that for quite a while, and then, uh, like 1960, he was quahoggin’, and they were makin’ pretty good money quahoggin’, and he said “What the hell, I’ll try lobsterin’ one more time. If this doesn’t work, I’ll just keep quahoggin’.” He fiddled around with the lobsterin’ and did pretty well, and bought another boat in ’67 or ’68. That was a 42’ boat, that was a real boat, and did that for the whole rest of his life.”

Like the young man that Michael Bell met on Long Wharf, Tom Hoxsie started working as a lobsterman as a young teen:

“And when I was twelve or thirteen years old we burned the woods down over there and that was the end of my free time. My father came home and said, ‘You have far too much free time – you need a job.’ And that was how I got to go.”

The first year Hoxsie went fishing for himself, he grossed around $7500 for the year – the equivalent to $26,658 today. “Big success!” he proclaimed. “It was 1981.”

In addition to the oral histories with working fishermen, the Center holds a collection with the oral history of a former lobsterman. In the Working the Waterfront, New Bedford, Massachusetts collection (AFC 2016/036), Madeleine Hall-Arber interviewed Kevin Hart about his work.


Hart worked as an offshore lobster fisherman for around 20 years before he made the decision to come onshore and start a new line of work, delivering water to fishing boats in New Bedford and Fairhaven. “We were getting the same price for our product 20 years later from when I started, basically, a little bit more. Maybe it went up a dollar while everything else went up a lot. So I saw the writing on the wall,” he said.

Of course, no celebration of National Lobster Day would be complete without some delicious lobster recipes. I found the first recipe, surprisingly, in the Stanley A. Ransom traditional music of Long Island collection (AFC 1997/028). Nestled amongst the pages at the end of the songbook was a recipe for “Port Jefferson Lobster Supreme.”

From what I can tell, “Lobster Supreme” is another name for what is essentially a lobster bisque, albeit with a lot more mushrooms than I would have expected.

The Seward Park High School “Our Neighborhood” collection (AFC 1986/012) yielded yet another recipe, this one for “Lobster Patties.”

Reading the recipe title, I was expecting the resulting dish to resemble something like a hamburger, only made of chopped up lobster. However, after reading through the entire thing, it appears the dish more closely resembles an empanada. Like the other recipes in the collection, this one is paired with a brief oral history of the recipe’s contributor – in this case, Migdonia Santos was interviewed by her daughter Irene Castro. The interview begins with what is possibly the most unusual description ever of how someone learned to cook:

“My mother taught all of us girls how to cook by hitting us with pots whenever we did something wrong. I learned how to cook fast because I tried not to make any mistakes so my mother wouldn’t hit me with a pot. If you would have gone to my house at that time, you would see all of the dents in the pans. Those pots banged over my head was sometimes painful. After I learned how to cook ‘the hard way,’ I loved it.”

Thankfully, the recipe Migdonia contributed to the project held an association with a more positive memory:

“I remember when my father used to wake up early in the morning to go fishing with my older brother. He would always bring back some flounders and sometimes even some lobsters. I would always help my mother cook them outside on an open fire, that me and my sisters used to build.

My mother learned this delicious recipe in Vieques taught by her close friend who lived next door to us. It was called Lobster Patties. My mother made it for us, every time my father would catch lobster when he went fishing. We all loved those lobster patties.”

Though the family moved from Vieques to New York City when Migdonia was 12 years old, the lobster patties continued to be a much loved family dish. “Every time I do the lobster patties,” Migdonia told her daughter, “they get me thinking of the old days when I cooked them for Christmas or Easter for the whole family.”

Both recipes sound delicious and relatively easy — aside from determining just which spices Migdonia meant by “frozen spices” — and I’m sure one of them will make its way onto my table for National Lobster Day. One thing’s for certain, though…no one is getting hit with a pot in my kitchen.

Further Reading

Make an appointment to visit the American Folklife Center reading room to see the following lobster-related collections:

• The Maine Folklife Center Collection (AFC 2012/047) – a collection of field recordings, photographs, and associated manuscripts, primarily of interviews with various residents of Maine and the Atlantic Maritime region. Topics include lobstering, fishing and commercial fisheries, and foodways. The collection is listed as both open for research and “in process.” Unprocessed materials in this collection include 26,220 digital files. The portion of the collection open for research is currently housed off-site at Fort Meade.
• The Markham Starr collection, 2005-2019 (AFC 2013/031) – a collection of 1,747 digital files of graphic, moving image, sound recording, and manuscript format documentary works created by Markham Starr, and 4 of Starr’s print monographs.
• Seward Park High School “Our Neighborhood” collection, 1985-1986 (AFC 1986/012) – a collection of family oral histories, recipes, and descriptions of foodways compiled by students of Seward Park High School, New York, N.Y.
• Stanley A. Ransom traditional music of Long Island collection (AFC 1997/028) – collection includes a published songbook that includes recipes.

For more lobster-related collection items at the Library of Congress:

• Check out this digitized copy of The Lobster War, by Thames Williamson, with the brilliant dedication: “For Warren Munsey – Maine fisherman extraordinary. He knows more about lobsters than they know about themselves.”
• Learn to play “The Lobster’s Folly,” from “Oberine” composed by Edward Jakobowski, words by Walter Summers
• Listen to “The Lobster’s Promenade,” recorded in Camden, New Jersey in 1911, courtesy of the Library’s National Jukebox.
• Listen to Sandra Hochman reading her poem “All the world loves a lobster” (timestamp 20:33)